By CHRISTOPHER GRAY

Published: July 14, 1991

THE Landmarks Preservation Commission will hold a hearing on Upper Manhattan landmarks tomorrow -- delayed from June 11 by Borough President Ruth W. Messinger and some local groups to allow more time for discussion.

But there is one building where the opposition of the owner has been increasing, not decreasing, and if the opposition is availing, then the future of the odd little villa structure at 12 West 129th Street is in doubt.

In the mid-19th century, Harlem was an orderly suburban village with large, free-standing houses oriented to the street grid. Late in 1862, William Paul a carpenter living in the West 20's, bought a 75-foot front triple lot on the south side of West 129th Street.

Paulwas in business with another carpenter, Thomas Wilson, and in 1863 one or the other -- or both -- built a clapboard two-and-a-half-story house that was later numbered 12 West 129th Street. The two men soon listed their home addresses as "129th off Fifth," and Wilson actually acquired the house from Paul in 1865. No photographs of the house survive from that era, but later records indicate that it had a gabled roof and may have in fact been a double house.

In 1882, the estate of a subsequent owner, Martin England, leased 12 West 129th Street to John B. Simpson Jr., later head of the Estey Piano Company. In the same year, Simpson, acting as his own architect, added first a front and then a rear porch -- he called both "piazzas" -- screened by piers and arches of elaborately sawed wood in a Moorish pattern. He also added chalet-style wood detailing to the gabled roof, giving a picturesque exoticism to what had apparently been a fairly conventional frame building.

Simpson occupied the house until the early 1890's. The England estate sold it to the Missionary Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis in 1896.

According to Sister Francis Marie, archivist for the order, the Missionary Sisters used the house as an intake center for destitute children on their way to the order's home in Peekskill, N.Y. A Peekskill architect, Asbury Barker, was retained to raise the house to a full three stories under a flat roof. In 1921, the sisters built a convent on the rear of the lot, at 15 West 128th Street, and perhaps it was at this time that the clapboard house went through its final metamorphosis: a coat of stucco that completely covered its original wooden sheath.

WHAT had begun in 1863 as a frame country house, been altered into an exotic chalet in 1882 and given a flat roof in 1896 was now a villa with a seaside air. A 1932 photograph shows that the stucco was tinted in contrasting colors, reminiscent of the style of Savannah, Ga., or the Gulf Coast.

The sisters sold the house in 1941 to the Nazareth Mission/Peace Center. Directory and other records for the property are sketchy between 1941 and 1979, when it was sold to the current owner, the Christ Temple Church of the Apostolic Faith. The pastor of the church, Bishop James I. Clark, said in an interview last spring that the building had been owned at one point by Father Divine, prominent in the middle of this century as the leader of a cult called the Kingdom of Peace.

Last February, the Landmarks Preservation Commission circulated a list of 25 upper Manhattan buildings it was considering for landmarking. On the list was Christ Temple, and indeed the church had written in 1981 and 1985 asking for the designation. But in March, in a preliminary interview, Bishop Clark said that the church was "considering the question."

Since April, he has declined to return telephone calls and letters asking for further comment and access to the house. Last May, Mercedes Herbert, a trustee of the church, said the church would definitely oppose designation because of its plans for the building. She would not respond to further questions.

Now the house looks just short of being abandoned. A huge yellow school bus crowds its unkempt front yard, windows are broken and the brightly painted stucco is now dingy. In balancing the pros and cons of designation the commissioners will no doubt keep returning to the dazzling porch woodwork, which is miraculously intact, and the idea that its survival or disappearance may lie with their decision.

Photo: The landmark status of 12 West 129th Street, built in 1863 and shown here in 1932, is under discussion. (The New York Public Library)